On Wednesday, the World Health Organization announced that the number of people killed by the Ebola virus has now risen to over five thousand, with more than fourteen thousand infected. In respond to the crisis, a new fund has been set up by some of Africa’s richest business people from all over the continent not just the infected countries in West Africa.
The African Union, which is the only body mandated to approach the African countries for healthcare workers drawn from their military, approached us to assist them with raising money to support those healthcare workers. A lot of the African governments can’t afford such a mission. It’s quite a considerable cost. They have for immediate deployment one thousand healthcare workers. We have now raised, as of this morning, forty-five million dollars. And the African Union have now pressed the button to start deploying those additional healthcare workers.
How are commercial minds and business people like yourself able to help in this crisis in a way that maybe governments aren’t so good at?
But so I have many many other businesses across Africa. We’ve been preparing countries where we operate with their preparations. We’ve been providing resources. And we’ve been making donations. But this was a specific request by the African Union. They already have people on the ground. There are more than three hundred healthcare workers in those countries. But they obviously like everybody else have been taken by surprise by this severity of it and are scaling up. The healthcare workers are coming from the military, which means the African governments are also contributing their salaries, their upkeep.
Why do you think it’s important to work together as an African continent and try to…You’ve described this as a “a hundred percent African solution” to this problem. Why is that important to you?
It’s not about African solutions or Asian solutions or American solutions. We have a global pandemic. It just happened to have started in that part of the world. When we have a global crisis, we must respond as a global citizens.
How quickly are you hoping that these health workers will be able to get on the ground and start helping as a direct result of the money you’ve managed to raise?
We want to get them there as quickly as possible.